Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-52) provided the vital link between the intellectual culture of central Europe and the Oxford Institute of Anthropology in its post-Second World War years. This book demonstrates his quiet influence within anthropology, which has extended from Mary Douglas to David Graeber, and how his remarkable poetry reflected profoundly on the slavery and murder of the Shoah, an event which he escaped from. Steiner’s concerns including inter-disciplinarity, genre, refugees and exile, colonialism and violence, and the sources of European anthropology speak to contemporary concerns more directly now than at any time since his early death.

Scholars have been trying to explain taboo customs ever since Captain Cook discovered them in Polynesia over 200 years ago. The subject has been treated at length, but none of the theories has more than a limited validity, so numerous are the taboos recorded and so diverse the societies in which they occur. This book contains chapters on: · Taboo as a Victorian invention · The complicated taboos in the Pentateuch · Taboos in Polynesia Originally published in 1956.

Presents 18 pieces by anthropologist Steiner (1909-52). They include deaccessions of labor and economics; a section from his dissertation on slavery; unpublished lectures on Aristotle, Simmel, and kinship; a selection of aphorisms; and extracts from his poetic cycle Conquests. In the introduction, Alder (German, King's College, London) and Fardon (West African anthropology, School of Oriental and African studies, London) relate his work to current concerns. Apparently only two volumes are planned. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The essays contained in this volume explore the historical trajectories along which the Mediterranean has been conceptualized as a cultural, religious and economical resource and how these various aspects are intertwined. While staying clear of a merely “imagological” or “representational” point of view, the authors consider the interplay between culturally shaped attributions (for example the longstanding desire for a Mediterranean “Otherness” as expressed in German literature), their testing in empirical encounters, and the effect these encounters produce on both sides. Although focused particularly on 19th and 20th century culture, this volume offers a timely contribution to conceptualising the challenges of the 21st century. The conjunction of both provinciality and universality, the connectivity and fragmentation of the Mediterranean continues to be at the basis of the European matrix of all possible (hi)stories.